From Camaro to Escalade： Al Oppenheiser Reveals How GM Built the Escalade IQ & Hummer EV

Well, so you are we think the only chief engineer to have engineered a car of the year winner as well as an SUV of the year winner. Wow. Which is quite a feat. It's quite an honor. I'm the chief engineer of the Escalade IQ and IQL and I also still am the chief engineer of Hummer EV. This is such a neat thing and you get really spoiled when you get in and put your foot on the brake and the door closes. Yeah. Because I'll jump into a Hummer and I'm sitting there with my foot on the brake and I'm like oh wait this is that old-fashioned I got to close it myself. Wait, I have to close my car door? Yeah, come on. I need a door closer. It was very crazy when it was explained I was going to be leaving the Camaro and go over to help EVs. Was that a shock? Big shock. Big shock. I actually had a conversation with Mark Royce about it and it was time to put the priority on making EVs exciting. No offense to bolts and bolts, but if we were going to grow our EV strategy and the strategy that Mary had laid out about our role in 000, we needed to really put our focus on EVs and Mark is the person who saved the Hummer name and he had it in his mind that he wanted to do a battery electric Hummer. So I could have moped and said maybe I should retire. I'm a Camaro guy. I got a garage full at home and so on, but you don't really get that many chances generally in life to start over again and so that's how we kind of got motivated that, hey, I get this opportunity to be part of the ground zero of GM moving to an EV world and the team for Hummer was hand-picked and actually beyond that the team for the battery electric trucks was hand-picked because of their ability to understand how we develop vehicles, but develop them fast and not afraid to try new things. We had the bet mentality that things like two pizza lunch, two pizza meetings. If you couldn't feed people in the room with two pizzas, you had too many people there. Fail fast and fix it fast. 24-hour rule. You could discuss something and go out and learn about it, but you had to come back in 24 hours and make a decision. Quick decision making. Autonomy. Push the decision making down to the lower levels of the team and don't have everything go up to be pre-review, pre-review, then all of a sudden get to an executive level and make a decision. In order to go fast, we did the entire battery electric truck architecture that way. We tried to act as a startup company. We came over and sat our engineers with our design team. Little things like that that take time out of your day to move fast. The team lived over here at the design studio, understood what the mission was. The IQ was meant for style conscious, the ones that want to be first. When a new technology comes out, they want to be first to try it. So I don't think EV is not new, but it's new in the Cadillac world in a luxury SUV. And the styling of the IQ has more sweeping roofline. The mission that we had from a styling standpoint was to not make it seem like a big SUV, that it was a luxury SUV styled for those that are trendsetters. And I think we accomplished that. The sweeping roofline, just to give an analogy, the same battery is a 24-mod battery that's in the Hummer. And that's 355 roughly miles range. This is 460. And how do you do that? Well, it's a narrower track than the Hummer. So this, we call this the narrow track version of the electric trucks. So that helps the overall arrow with the lower CDA. But we exceeded our drag and our CD targets for this way beyond what they were as a 0.34. And we're at a 0.32. And that just helps enable the range. So again, this sweeping roofline really helps enable the aerodynamics of the vehicle. We have the underbody strakes and so on that also help really put a focus on maximizing the mileage out of that 24-mod battery versus what Hummer did. And that's not really a butthole. Hummer has a different purpose. This is going to be the family vehicle. So to get that 460, we really focused on arrow. We are now a luxury SUV that if you're in Detroit, you can take your family to Chicago. You don't have to stop and charge. Or you can go to Florida on three charges. I mean, it's something that now there is no excuse why you would not want to consider an electric SUV and a luxury SUV like Escalade. And I mentioned Escalade's been around for over 25 years. And we've sold over a million of them. So it is a world-recognized luxury SUV. And I think the IQ and IQL is a perfect addition to the family. When we set out to do things like an Escalade IQ, we sit in a room with the whole team and say, what do you want to read about when you look backwards after we're in production? And it always comes up, Motor Trend of the Year. Because we've all seen the calipers our whole lives, anybody in the auto industry. And to be able to be part of a team or even acknowledge as an influencer in the industry or whatever it may be, to be part of that and actually put your hands on some hardware. I mean, it's kind of like Stanley Cup for the auto industry. And you know, I would say there are a few hundred people that have a picture of themselves with calipers. It was pretty special. Very humbled and excited that we can now say that we're the Motor Trend SUV of the Year. This one's different because the passion behind the team is not different. But the Cadillac, myself learning Cadillac, I had little exposure to the CT4 when I had Camaro. So I sort of understood Cadillac is different. And Cadillac has a whole different structure of meetings, of approvals, of consistency. There are people that their role is to make sure that no matter what Cadillac you get into, the customer feels the same, whether it's a CT4 or a Blackwing or an Escalade ICE or an Escalade EV. And I mean, the attention to detail, to respect the Cadillac brand and the legacy that it has, you really feel that there is a priority at General Motors to earn the Escalade crest and to take that back to maybe where it originally started. It used to be named as the standard of the world. And you can feel it. You can see it. There's definitely a family environment of Cadillac that no matter which team you talk to, they all have the same mission is you want to earn that crest on the front. And so that's different. And I think the passion that goes into making sure, you know, we don't go do anything necessarily specific for the EV Escalade that you don't go and talk to your other counterparts to say, hey, is this going to progress the brand? So it's very, it's different for me. It was a good learning experience and I really enjoy it. So is this going to be your last job at GM or is Rice going to shock you yet again? I don't know. We talked earlier. I don't really consider this a job. I think I have the luckiest job in the world being a chief engineer. It's an aspiration of any engineer that comes to GM anyway, in my experience. The fact that I was able to achieve it for so many years, I've been a chief engineer for 26 years. I have bosses above me that haven't even been at GM that long. So I've been very lucky and I think I stay because I love it. I love the challenges. I've been given some great opportunities in my career as a chief and before that. And you know, I wouldn't do anything different if I started all over again. And how long do I go? It's still fun. If it's not fun to get up and come in, you know, I'm 63, but I still get up at four in the morning. I do my stretches. I come in excited, thinking about what can we do different today and how can we progress the company today. And as long as I'm able to do that and they're interested in me doing that and my badge works, I'll come in. I'll come in every day.